One of the primary goals of the Stream survey program is the assessment of streams and rivers within the 12 river basins located throughout the state. Within each of these systems are areas called HUC (Hydrologic Unit Code). These codes are a way of identifying all of the drainage basins in the United States. A drainage basin is an area or region of land that catches precipitation that falls within that area, and funnels it to a particular creek, stream, river and so on, until the water drains into an ocean. These basins are of various shapes and sizes ranging from a few acres to thousands of square miles. They will cross artificial boundaries such as county, state and international borders. A watershed is a term commonly used in place of drainage basin.

In conjunction with the Kansas Alliance for Wetlands and Streams, KDWP summarized available infomation from our Stream survey database and was able to generate a Sub Watershed report evaluating fish, mussel, and aquatic macroinvertebrate data collected from over 1000 surveys performed from 1994 through 2004.

The following report is a summary of this information collected from various HUCs throughout the river and stream systems of the state of Kansas.